


Eyes in the Mirror

by Bhelryss



Category: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: Gen, Transformation, fomortiis - Freeform, it's a bit gross. a touch body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 21:20:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20627711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bhelryss/pseuds/Bhelryss
Summary: What would you do for power?What would you promise?





	Eyes in the Mirror

It starts small. Nothing but a nosebleed, a little cough. Perhaps the dust of the library, perhaps a return of his childhood frailty. Knoll looks on in concern, as Lyon wipes away the blood, but ultimately says nothing. What is a nosebleed, when they have research to do. They have a demon calling out from a sacred stone, and Lyon has been promised power to change things, so long as he does one favor.

The favor isn’t clear, but he’d taken the deal anyway. Power to change things...well he’d do almost anything for that. His father is ailing and ill, and every year the earthquakes grow more intense. Ephraim and Eirika are leaving him behind, and every time they turn back for him shame burns in his stomach. They’re humoring him, and it burns painfully, hatefully between his lungs. With power he could change all of that.

_ All of it _ .

The nosebleeds become more frequent. He keeps a darkly colored handkerchief in his pockets, and he hides it as best he can. Research doesn’t tell Lyon what it was exactly that he’d promised, and it doesn’t tell him why his health is ailing. He’s started to get fevers, ones that leave him exhausted when they finally break. He shakes and sweats in his clothes, pulse weak and heart fluttery. 

“Prince Lyon,” Knoll murmurs, gentle hands on his forehead and at his wrist. “You should rest.” There is a book in his hands and blood on his shirt from a nosebleed he hadn’t noticed. There is something dark in his handkerchief, coughed up by accident, and an itch at the base of his neck. It feels like a headache coming on. “You seem poorly.”

Lyon thinks about denying it. Thinks about continuing to read, even though he’s finding it hard to concentrate. “I probably should,” Lyon finally says. His head spins, when he stands, and it takes him a moment for him to find his equilibrium. “Yes, I think that is a good idea.”

When he wakes from a nap, unexpected, black spiderweb streaks stretch up his arm from a dark, ugly mark. He coughs, and what comes up is black. Lyon shakily goes to find a mirror, and traces those black lines up his neck and across his face. He can’t hide this. One of the creeping strands touches his eye, and the sclera there black. He can’t hide this.

The only person he trusts enough to let into his personal chambers is Knoll. “Prince Lyon,” he says quietly, pressing clean cloths to just one of those ugly, black marks. “I have found nothing in the books on your ailment.” Lyon shivers, sweaty and wan, and listens. “The dark stone- forgive me, the stone’s Lord calls it your promise.” 

“My promise…” Lyon mumbles. “For power, I gave a promise…”

“Prince Lyon, you need a healer.” Knoll’s hand stills over Lyon’s a gentle, kind touch. “I know a father from the church, one of his disciples is a great healer. I can bring her here for you, quietly if you wish. Your lord father calls for you, and it brings him distress to know you, too, are ill.”

Lyon only shivers, and turns his face away. He’s looked in the mirror lately, and he knows both of his eyes are yellow now, luminous lanterns shining in a black background. It’s unnerving, and it is his own gaze. Knoll’s hands look starkly white on top of his own, stained a dusty, dark blue from his fingertips to his forearms. Even his veins are changed from the elbow down, a soft pink where they should be that faint blue. “No healers,” he whispers. “It’s not safe.” If they know, if they find out, they’ll seal away the dark stone, and steal all of Lyon’s promised power.

He has to have it. He has to have that power.

Knoll, obviously unhappy, nods. “Very well.” It isn’t the last time Knoll brings it up, but it does mark the end of this conversation. “I’ll be back with more books,” he promises as he leaves. It leaves Lyon in the dark, alone in his rooms. In the quiet, in the privacy of his own rooms, in the dark, Lyon hesitantly reaches for his back.

Tentatively, he pauses shy of his shoulder blades. It hurts. It hurts and he’s afraid to know why. Is this what he promised? His health, his appearance? Is this what he sold to the dark stone’s Lord for power?

Whatever it is that’s growing from his back is gooey, offensive to the touch. He shivers, and this time not from fever, and pulls mucus covered fingers back. Even those dark marks on his body have started to shed that thick, semitransparent sludge. It stains his sheets, his clothes, the bandages Knoll brings. It coats his fingers far longer than it should, though he wipes his hands off again and again. Nothing makes it dry again, nothing makes his skin regain a normal, healthy color, and nothing keeps more from appearing on his body.

One morning he wakes up, rubs at his forehead, and finds something new. Something that is hard and smooth, something just above his eyebrows, something cool to the touch. When he sees it in the light, in the mirror he’s grown to dread, that something is a bone-white protrusion. He touches it, shoulders tense, and stares at himself. If it weren’t for his hair, Lyon wouldn’t even recognize himself.

Is this what he’s promised for power?

“What’s happening to me,” Lyon asks in a growl, unable to soften his own voice. “Knoll, what have you found.” Knoll won’t meet his gaze, but Lyon can understand it. It fills him with rage, toe curling rage, that even Knoll hates to look at him, but he understands it. Looking in the mirror has become harder and harder.

When he looks he can see that those things growing from his back have started unfolding, something webby and still covered in that sticky goop. He doesn’t have to look to know that that cold hardness above his eyebrows have started growing upwards, a bone-white shield that mocks him when he runs his fingers along the shell. Not only that, but his fingertips have grown sharp, and he has a shredded blanket playing the price of his realization. 

Knoll’s visits come farther and farther apart. It’s still him that brings Lyon meals, it’s still Knoll who hands over replacement blankets, clean sheets, towels, but he stops coming with news. He stops coming for company. It makes him angry...Lyon presses knife sharp fingertips into the wood of his door, and scratches deep trenches into it as he rages. Every yell is a guttural growl, and he screams sometimes because he is so angry, because he is so afraid.

Is this the promise he made for power?

New headaches bring visions. The dark stone resting on Lyon’s pillow, on his desk, hiding amongst his books. Sometimes it talks to him. “I promised you power, and you promised.” It always stops just before saying what was promised. What did he promise?  _ What did he promise _ ?

“I didn’t promise you this.” Lyon snarls at it, one hand in his hair and the other gripping on that hard crown. The larger it grows, the more complex it looks. Large prongs seem to be growing out of it, growing up and forward. Like...like horns. His lower back has started itching, and when he reaches back he finds another slimy circle. Lyon grimaces, and wipes his hands off on his blankets. They’re already ruined from sweat and from the mucus he wipes off every morning with disgust, he feels no guilt for using them as a towel.

The next time he tugs at his hair in frustration some of it comes away from his scalp. It doesn’t hurt, but Lyon still stairs at it in horror. Even though he hates to do it, he rushes to the mirror. Turning his head to see more angles, Lyon sucks in a hissing breath. He hadn’t noticed, but he doesn’t have only one balding patch. Hesitant touches around the back of his head only finds more of the same: smooth skin free of hair. From the mirror, Lyon can tell that the exposed skin is that same blue, and it isn’t hard to assume that it’s the same color on th skin he doesn’t see a reflection of.

“I didn’t promise this,” he whispers, feeling at his neck, probing the pink blaze there. It’s something like a diamond shape, the uppermost point at the underside of his chin and the lower point between his collar bones. If it were happening to someone else it might’ve been pretty, incredibly novel and even more interesting from a research standpoint. But it  _ is _ happening to him, and he hates it.

Tensing up, he stares at the mirror. “I hate you,” he hisses. “I hate you.” Scowling turns into something worse, something more animalistic. Lyon doesn’t recognize the person in the mirror. For the first time in his life, he throws the first punch.

The mirror shatters.

His skin is unbroken.

Lyon howls, and the growths on his back flex. He scratches at his door, at his walls. He shreds his blankets, his pillows. Lifting his desk up and throwing it across the room is so easy, so easy. It splinters, and he stomps on the pieces that fall away from the body. He howls, and he tears down the wall decorations and throws them.

Panting in the aftermath, Lyon looks at the mess and feels nothing. The dark stone sits untouched among the ruins, and laughs him in a deep voice. Lyon throws a mirror shard at it, but it passes through. Another vision, then. “I didn’t promise this,” he accuses. “Where is my power?” 

The power to change things, the power to shape his life the way he  _ want _ it to be.

“You already have it,” the stone says, it’s growling voice almost sounding like Lyon’s own. It is so strange, and terrifying, to hear his own voice coming from the stone.

“Stop it,” he commands. “Use your own voice.”

“This is my voice,” the stone condescends. “Stop using mine.” 

Knoll brings food, he leaves, and he returns to take the dishes. “Knoll,” Lyon calls hoarsely, “wait.” Thankfully, Knoll hesitates. Lyon hates to beg, and sometimes he wants to wrap his hands around Knoll’s throat and squeeze and squeeze, rather than beg. “What’s happening to me. What do you know. You must tell me if you know. You  _ have to _ ,” he growls. 

Knoll shrugs, and lies. “I truly do not know, my prince.” Lyon screams, and Knoll flees. Lyon slams his fist into the door, and it shakes, and he screams. He sinks his claws into the door, and scratches until he’s splintered enough to sate his rage.

“LIAR, HOW DARE YOU LIE TO ME.”

Knoll doesn’t come back.

Without the mirror, Lyon can’t visually track the changes. His hair is gone, and the shield growing up from his forehead is no longer a shield. From the way it feels, Lyon knows it is something more akin to a crown. Horns that grow forward and up, the prongs that branch out from the underside of the shield...it’s a crown, he’s almost certain. The growths from his back are beginning to feel like wings, and he can flex them if he really concentrates, and the mark on his lower back is beginning to grow outward, maybe like a tail.

What is he becoming...what is he becoming?

He is growing more tired every day. The dark stone laughs at him, while he lies among the mess he’s made of his bed, and Lyon’s anger drains away. He’s too tired to be angry, he’s too tired to be a lot of things. The stone shows up on his chest sometimes, heavy and warm. “You’re almost completed your promise,” the stone assures him, still speaking in Lyon’s own voice. “This is almost over for you.”

He doesn’t believe in the saint or the church, those dusty writings and old tales, but he believes this. The dark stone that promised power, and cause  _ this _ , whatever  _ this _ really is...he believes in this. Whatever this is, it’s true power. Even like this, laying belly down and exhausted, he hungers for it. If he only held this power, everything in the world could be his. If he only held this power…

Lyon goes to sleep, and when he wakes up he’s in a different place. The world outside the windows is dark, so it must be night, but he stands in front of the throne instead of laying down in his bed. He rolls his shoulders while he tries to puzzle out how he got here, and isn’t startled at the noise his wings make. The bigger they grow the more noise they make, and he’s already classified it as a regular thing. This is just a noise his body makes.

He goes to sleep, and wakes up in a different place. 

He goes to sleep, and wakes up in a different place. 

This time, he panics. Infiltrating the temple that houses the dark stone is hard, especially with his current appearance, but he manages. Breathing hard, wings curled close to his back and his tail curled around one of his legs, he reaches out for the dark stone. “What have you done.” Lyon demands.

“What have you done to me.”

“I have remade you,” the stone says, and the voice it speaks in is loud and thunderous. It’s still Lyon’s voice. “You have all the power you dreamed of.” 

“I didn’t dream of this,” he spits, angry. “I’ve become a demon.” 

“Not yet,” the dark stone says, “but you will be.”

A shadow peels itself off the wall, and it looks a bit like the horror Lyon used to see in the mirror. “You will be the king of demons,” the shadow promises, its great hand closing on his throat. “And I will be reborn.” Lyon tries to scream, but when he opens his mouth no sound comes out. This isn’t what he promised, this isn’t what he wanted. This can’t be what he promised!

The dark stone shatters.


End file.
